Finding an extreme value (a maximum or a minimum) in a dataset is a common task. US Patent Publication No. US 2015/0200009, (entitled “MEMORY DEVICE”), published on Jul. 16, 2015, issued as U.S. Pat. No. 9,859,005 on Jan. 2, 2018, filed by the common assignee of the present invention and incorporated herein by reference, describes a method of finding an extreme value in a large dataset in memory devices in a constant time O(1). The computation time is roughly constant, regardless of the dataset size.
The prior art method defined in US Patent Publication No. US 2015/0200009, concurrently operates on one bit of all items in the dataset at a time, starting at the MSB (most significant bit) and ending at the LSB (least significant bit). The computation time of such a method is proportional to the number of bits representing the numbers in the dataset, which may be 16 bits, 32 bits and the like.